[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 104 (Wednesday, July 14, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H5593-H5594]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                CONGRATULATING OCEAN WATCH AND ITS CREW

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, I rise today to congratulate the crew 
of the sailing ship Ocean Watch, a 60-foot sailboat, which just 
completed a 28,000-mile journey around the Americas. It's been a little 
more than a year ago that Mark Schrader, Herb McCormick, David 
Thoreson, and David Logan left Seattle and sailed north. They sailed 
around Alaska and then through the treacherous Northwest Passage, an 
area that's usually too full of ice to pass but is now navigable 
because of the rapidly warming Arctic.
  After about a hundred days, the crew arrived safely in the waters of 
the Atlantic Ocean. From there, the Ocean Watch sailed south along the 
Atlantic coast of both continents to the challenging route around Cape 
Horn, where they once again met the waters of the Pacific. After 
traveling over a year and completing more than 28,000 nautical miles, 
they finished their expedition and returned home to Seattle. They set 
sail with the mission of inspiring, educating, and engaging the 
citizens throughout the Americas to protect our fragile oceans.
  This amazing journey was envisioned by David Rockefeller, Jr., and 
Captain Mark Schrader of Stanwood, Washington. To implement their 
shared vision, Mr. Rockefeller enlisted the assistance of a nonprofit 
organization he helped to found, Sailors for the Sea, that encourages 
sailors to become more active stewards of the world's oceans. Over the 
course of their journey, the crew that included experienced sailors, 
photographers, journalists, educators, and scientists, visited 13 
countries at 45 ports of call. In Alaska, they visited with the Namgis 
Indians of British Columbia and were themselves educated on the 
destruction of the local habitat by industrial logging and over-
fishing. They docked in New York City for a presentation at the New 
York Yacht Club, where they shared their experience and mission to a 
standing-room only crowd.
  At each stop, the crew shared their experiences and raised awareness 
of important ocean health issues like polar ice melt, ocean pollution, 
collapsing fisheries, acidification, and coastal erosion due to sea 
level rise. To aid in their mission, the Ocean Watch carried with it 
various instruments and cameras, coordinated data collection with 
various NASA and NOAA satellites, and took advantage of the unique 
opportunity to track and monitor global data from a single platform. In 
the true spirit of conservation and education, these measurements will 
be shared and used to complement other oceanographic, atmospheric, and 
climate research programs, the majority of which originated from the 
Applied Physics Lab and the Joint Institute for the Study of the 
Atmosphere and Oceans at the University of Washington. To help in 
accomplishing the educational goals of this project, they used a set of 
curricula and educational resources developed by Seattle's Pacific 
Science Center, and brought with them trained, bilingual educators who 
shared lessons linked to the onboard scientific research with the 
communities that they visited.
  The completion of Ocean Watch's extraordinary voyage cannot come at a 
more critical time in our Nation's ecological history. As we watch 
helplessly as the oil gushes into the Gulf of Mexico and it devastates 
the region's ecosystem with the far-reaching potential of consequences 
that extend well into the Gulf, we need more advocates who

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understand the importance of protecting our fragile oceans.
  While the crew of the Ocean Watch successfully completed their 
voyage, their work has only just begin. After both the Exxon Valdez and 
the disaster in the Gulf, I'm not sure how many more wake-up calls we 
need, but I do know that we're going to need people like Mark Schrader 
and his crew to help educate us on what is happening to our oceans. I 
commend the crew of the Ocean Watch for moving us forward on this 
difficult path.
  I recently read a quote by a British man named Thomas Fuller in 1732. 
He said, ``We never know the worth of water until the well is dry.'' I 
sincerely hope that with advocates like the crew of the Ocean Watch, we 
will prove Mr. Fuller wrong.

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